In 2015, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen was onboard the International Space Station (ISS), photographing the tops of thunderstorms from Earth orbit. And he saw something very interesting indeed.

The house-sized asteroid 2012 TC4 is slated to give Earth a close shave on Thursday, October 12, swooshing by our planet at approximately 5:41 UTC (1:41 a.m. EDT) at a distance of about 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers). Although ...

Three U.S.-based astrophysicists won the Nobel prize in physics Tuesday for their discovery of gravitational waves, a phenomenon Albert Einstein predicted a century ago in his theory of general relativity. Here's what their ...

The space race between the USA and Russia started with a beep from the Sputnik satellite exactly 60 years ago (October 4, 1957) and ended with a handshake in space just 18 years later. The handshake was the start of many ...

Lava tubes, underground caves created by volcanic activity, could provide protected habitats large enough to house streets on Mars or even towns on the moon, according to research presented at the European Planetary Science ...

Observations of the moon have revealed the final resting place of the European Space Agency's first lunar mission, SMART-1. The spacecraft was sent into a controlled impact with the lunar surface 11 years ago. Although an ...

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (ESA), established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 18 member states. Headquartered in Paris, ESA has a staff of close to 2,000 with an annual budget of about €3.6 billion in 2009.

ESA's main spaceport is the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana. It is close to the equator, hence commercially important orbits are easier to access. ESA became the market leader in commercial space launches in the 1990s. In recent years, ESA has also established itself as a major player in space exploration.

ESA science missions are based at ESTEC in Noordwijk, Netherlands, Earth Observation missions at ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, ESA Mission Control (ESOC) is in Darmstadt, Germany, the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) that trains astronauts for future missions is situated in Cologne, Germany and the European Space Astronomy Centre is located in Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain.